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Yeah... I don't go to class (usually)

What I do to study.

My initial frustration

My second semester of my master’s degree consisted of multiple lessons from 18:50 until 22:00. And it was always the same: This really smart person, who has studied his ass off for years, was reading a basic concept from some institutional slides that were written a couple of years ago, and never changed until now. And thinking about it, it has been like this on most of my courses in my institutional education experience.

So I decided to stop torturing myself, and stop going to classes… I study only by myself, and go to the university to submit assignments and defend projects.

Using AI

After my professor gives me a list of topics to study, instead of going to class, I use this list to find “good” resources on the internet. But instead of googling, I use a Claude Skill that I designed to understand what I need, make the right search, and filter for quality websites. For example:

And yes, probably I could have found these same resources by googling, or maybe Claude is missing some other resources; but, there’s just way too much information on the internet. Using an above-average LLM has helped me spend more time studying and less time getting the information.

And that’s an important aspect behind my critique of current education: information is there… there’s no need to have someone output information; instead, with the huge amount of information on the environment, there’s a huge need for people that help teach how to deal with this huge amount of information, how to pick between a good and a bad resource, how to detect fake information.

What about professors?

This is a real issue where the experience of a PhD can actually be applied in the classroom. Instead of having this really smart person reading the fundamentals from a standard book on the subject, let the students struggle with the content, and instead have them help with the parts that are hard to develop by only reading stuff on the internet: critical thinking, teamwork, researching as a skill, idk…

A researcher is someone that spends most of his/her time checking sources, analysing them, and drawing conclusions about them. Teaching these types of skills is a way more valuable use of their time and helps them get better at this task.

Conclusion

So… I would go to classes (even if they ended at 22:00) if I had to prepare the topic before the class with topics that the professor suggests, and the class would have the only purposes:

  1. Answering questions about the topics left to study.
  2. Being challenged by the professor to apply the topics I’ve learned by solving exercises.
  3. Sharing knowledge and findings with the professor and my fellow classmates.